1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to extend the capability of a web browser to determine the root cause for an issue occurred in the web application more specifically pin-point which entity causes the issue in the network topology diagram presented in the web browser plug-in panel window and provide suggestion web search query for the issue occurred in the web application.
2. Description of Related Art
In a real-time production environment, it is hard to identify the root cause for any critical issues like performance, security threats, broken authentication, security mis-configuration, etc. While participating in the investigation for the root cause, technical support team validates the issues in production environment, using the structured monitoring, and operations processes according to the established frameworks such as Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), Information Technology (IT) Services Management, and Information Technology (IT) Operational Frameworks. The technical support team investigates the root cause by troubleshooting the possible devices, such as network infrastructure device, application servers and database server. Using common troubleshooting and diagnostic tools such as Performance Monitor and diagnostic approaches such as cause/effect diagrams, it is real hard for technical support team to identify the root cause and resolution for the issue.
In order to find where exactly issue is occurring or to find the root cause of web application issue, the web application support team needs to depend on multiple team members from network infrastructure team, database team and computer server team. The web application support team needs to look for their appropriate time to discuss the issue. In addition, they need to spend a lot of time doing information gathering about the web application and the issue prior to actually identifying the root cause and troubleshooting the issue. Thus, it could take several days to resolve a simple issue in production environment.
A traditional web browser does not provide the capability to find the root cause of web application issue. Although popular browser extensions such Firebug, HTTPWatch, Fiddler or Web Developer tools provides the ability to extend the web browser functionality for analyzing HTTP traffic and allowing inspect, edit and monitor CSS, HTML, JavaScript and Net requests in the web document. However, these extensions do not provide ability to pinpoint which component causes the issue and lack of providing information related to the issue outside of client computer.
However, there are multiple entities to be examined to determine the root cause of an issue, such entities are network infrastructure devices like Firewall, Load Balancer, Network Interface Card (NIC), and computer servers like web application server, Domain Name Server, Proxy Server and Database Server configuration, HTTP and Network Traffic analysis. There are multiple tools like network tracer, dump file analyzer, system log viewer, database profiler, log parser and HTTP analyzer that are available to intercept the issue in various aspects to find the root cause by the technical support team. Also, popular systems include OpenView® from Hewlett-Packard Corporation, Unicenter® from Computer Associates, IBM Tivoli® Framework exists for managing entire enterprise-level networks and application. Another example of such a system is the Solarwinds® Orion® Network Performance Monitor and Application Monitor. However, these systems does not provide the web browser extension that helps user to determine the root cause for an issue and does not pin-point on which component causes the issue and what are the recommended solution from internet experts for the specified issue.
In another aspect, these commercial systems provide a vast amount of information that requires special understanding of result codes. These codes cannot be interpreted easily by everyone and needs some additional knowledge. These systems show the time duration taken for the web pages to render, but does not provide the ability to show which device of the network infrastructure or computer server caused the delay or/and why it took that much amount of time to complete the web application request.
In addition, to determine the root cause, the web application support team needs to go the through log files of each network infrastructure device and the computer servers presented in the web application network topology diagram. Each log will be huge and may contain a lot of general logging information about the device. This general logging information is unrelated to the issue at hand. The vast content may make it harder for the web application support team to find and extract logging information related to the issue.
In order to use the diagnostic tools, web application support team needs to be trained to use these tools for finding the root cause. There is no such system or method to provide an easy and elegant way to identify the root cause of the issue at the client (i.e., application support team personnel) web browser plug-in panel without logging into the individual computer server or network infrastructure devices.
In order to overcome such problems, there is a need for a method or system to extend the web browser capabilities for identifying the root cause of web application issue and providing the experts recommendation for the issue through web search. Such systems disclosed in many U.S. patent applications and patent document but none of the system disclosed to provide the functionality via web browser plug-in.
In light of the shortcomings of the various currently available systems, there is still a need for a quick and simple method for identifying the issue occurred in a web application. In particular, there is an interest in a troubleshooting tool that allows a user to easily identify the issue and provide the possible workaround or resolution for the issue over the web browser.